openSUSE 12.2: Green Means Go!

Dear users, developers, and Geekos around the world – openSUSE 12.2 is ready for you! Two months of extra stabilization work have resulted into a stellar release, chock-full of goodies, yet stable as you all like it.

The latest release of the world’s most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in mature new technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder.

“We are proud of this release, maintaining the usual high openSUSE quality standards.” said Andrew Wafaa from the openSUSE Board. “The delay in the schedule caused by our growth in the last two years means we have to work on scaling our processes. Now this release is out and with the upcoming openSUSE conference in October in Prague, the community has time and opportunity to work on that.”

A few of the most notable changes are in the following areas:

Performance

From the kernel to the desktop, openSUSE 12.2 brings you speed-ups: Linux 3.4 has a faster storage layer to prevent blocking during large transfers. glibc 2.15, the basic library, improves the performance of many functions especially on 64 bit systems. Systemd 44 enables faster booting. And KDE 4.8.4 builds on Qt 4.8.1 to make the desktop more responsive.

Evolution

openSUSE adopts the latest developments in Linux distribution technology as they mature. The GRUB2 bootloaderÂ is now the default, we’ve begunÂ the process of revising and simplifying the UNIX filesystem hierarchy to improve compatibility across distributions, and during startup andÂ and shutdown Plymouth 0.8.6.1 provides flicker-free transitions and attractive animations.

Polish

GNOME 3.4 introduces smooth scrolling in all applications, a reworked System Settings app and polished Contacts manager. XFCE 4.10 has an improved application finder and allows vertical panels. The Dolphin file manager is both prettier and faster.

Innovation

XOrg 1.12 introduces support for multitouch input devices, and multi-seat deployments. Mozilla FirefoxÂ supports the latest Web technologies. The llvmpipe software 3D renderer enables Gnome Shell and virtual machines to use compositing even where no 3D hardware is present. GIMP 2.8 and Krita 2.4 make Free image processing and natural media painting competitive with proprietary tools. Tomahawk Player promises to make listening to music on your computer a social experience.

Stability

LibreOffice 3.5 continues to refine the Free office suite experience with many additions and improvements. KDE 4.8.4’s email and calendaring applications have increased stability, while the next-generation btrfs filesystem now has improved error handling and recovery tools.

Management

The 3.4 kernel allows the capping of CPU usage across entire groups of processes. The new version of systemd offers a watchdog function for supervising services under its control, as well as a new process management tool. Sysadmins will benefit from a new suite of Digital Forensics/Incident Response tools.

Novelty

A set of heavyweight scientific tools brings math applications such as numeric computation, plotting, and visualization to openSUSE. The Stellarium astronomical simulator lets you explore the night sky without a telescope. Programmers will enjoy version 1.0.2 of Google’s Go language, as well as the latest C++ language standards implemented in GCC 4.7.1 and Qt Creator 2.5.

Aside from these technical changes, the documentation team has made a major revision of the reference manuals, and has introduced changes to make it easier for community contributors to write openSUSE documentation.

For more details about the latest innovations in openSUSE 12.2 visit opensuse.org/12.2.

Support and release process

As usual, this release will continue to be supported for at least 2 release cycles + 2 months. Currently, openSUSE 12.3 is scheduled in about six months, as the 12.2 release was delayed for two months. As the project is currently re-thinking its engineering- and release processes, this schedule is likely to change.

A number of changes has already been implemented to the openSUSE development process, with the release team experimenting with staging projects to distribute the integration workload and the Open Build Service team having upgraded the build farm with SSDs and using preinstall images to rapidly setup build virtual machines. More changes, however, are to be decided upon at the openSUSE Summit in Orlando and the openSUSE Conference in October in Prague. Be there if you want to make a difference!

Yeah, strange things are going on in this world – and one of this is to replace relatively well written proprietary Linux programs with their buggy and slower OSS counterparts. Remember the “gnash” joke? If OSS manages to beat its equivalent propware – no problem. But for all the the other cases it would be awfully nice and helpful for most of us to have the respective default installation choices.

It hangs if you boot with wireless(on laptop) turned off, whatever you use network manager or not(as in 12.1).
Acpi problems, cannot modify monitor brightness, it works with acpi=off but you will not have any power management.

This release is awful! I’ve NEVER experience such an unpolished Linux distribution I’ve used in my nearly-fifteen years using Linux!

1. It takes 35 minutes to install from DVD (including the autoconfiguration step) on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM with a 160 GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD.
2. Once openSUSE 12.2 is installed, the Ethernet interface (Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5755M) flaps constantly.
3. The Software Manager and the Software Update tool both freeze for long periods of time and complain that the repositories are unavailable – probably because of the flapping of the Ethernet interface.
4. Every time that the Software Manager is launched, it’s all scrunched up in the upper left corner of the screen (and expanding it to full-size leaves the package and the description windows so small that they’re unusable).
5. The installer-script for the Broadcom 43xx drivers (/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware) causes a kernel panic _every_ time (leaving the system in an unusable state on more than one occasion) so the Broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN NIC is also unusable.
6. The Software Manager closes after every change (forcing users to re-enter the root password in order to return to the interface).
7. The packaging of VirtualBox more obtuse than any other distribution that I’ve ever used: The VirtualBox-qt package is not installed along with the Virtualbox package/pattern (Other distributions include the qt interface along with the executable); the VBox GTK interface (installed by default along with VirtualBox) does not explain that the reason that it failed to run is that the user must belong to the vboxuser group, and; Installing the Default kernel does not update GRUB (so, on the next boot, the Desktop kernel is loaded instead).
8. The video driver (nouveau) seems to be very unstable and occasionally leaves 98% of the screen unusable.

If I sound ungrateful, it’s only because I was so hopeful that I’d finally found a better RPM-based desktop distribution to fill the gap left by Mandriva’s collapse.

openSUSE 12.1, seems good – though the installation process seems interminably long and VirtualBox suffers from the same packaging idiocy.

>>>1. It takes 35 minutes to install from DVD (including the autoconfiguration step) on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM with a 160 GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD.

You are a lucky guy! I can not install from DVD at all. System is hanging. No log, no trace. The LiveCD is okay.

>>>3. The Software Manager and the Software Update tool both freeze for long periods of time and complain that the repositories are unavailable â€“ probably because of the flapping of the Ethernet interface.

Yes, it freezes in spite of my stable wired network connection. Suddenly it started working normally a day ago. I have no explanation. Maybe there were problems with repositories.

>>>6. The Software Manager closes after every change (forcing users to re-enter the root password in order to return to the interface).

To fix the garble screen with nouveau driver.
1. Press ESC at grub boot and remove “splash=silent” from kernel opts. Append ” 3″ to get RL3. Boot and login as root, or the affected user.

2. This is a KDE problem, that starts to occur from the second boot. Remove /var/tmp/kde-cache tmp and socket files. Do the same in the /tmp directory. Same thing in ~user/.kde4/ directory. If unhappy, remove “splash=silent” from the grub menu, which permanently stops the splash screen. It does, however, work OK with the splash.

“The llvmpipe software 3D renderer enables Gnome Shell and virtual machines to use compositing even where no 3D hardware is present.”

yep, by piping/offloading all the work to the CPU(s) :( so unless you have hardware with a 3D-able driver, the choice is yours (I hope this llvmpipe can be turned on/off?) – fast and simple, or slow and beautiful … either way, enjoy this release!

Just installed 12.2 over a blown-up 12.1 install. What an improvement!
UI is fast and responsive, even with a full cpu load. Very impressive.
Where 12.1 would be all but unusable on this machine (Single-core 2ghz Athlon64, 2gb, 250g drive).
12.2 is just a shock!
Very, very good job developers!!! I am mightily impressed.

i find it hard to believe that such an update like the one ,s you have been speaking about could over see a little problem such as mine when ,i work with suse that it works beautifully and no problem but as soon as i install it , it doe,s not work the wireless modem is no were to be seen and bad luck you are stuck that way can you help!

Unfortunately with each new release, more and more features don’t work. Now I don’t have any sound, wobbly windows are gone, no shutdown option from the panel (just suspend), no longer have the ability to open a terminal window by right-clicking the desktop and selecting “Open in Terminal”, and window sizes are not saved (especially in Software Management). I had hoped this would be an improvement, but so far it’s been a huge disappointment.

KDE and Gnome are responsible for most of the problems, and will therefore be present in most distributions. Bring back KDE3! Bring back FVWM95! Suse mistakes are the broken login screen, and VirtualBox RPMS on the DVD that don’t run.

KDE3? Forget it! They’ve slapped udisks2 on it and now it stops me unloading removable drives even if I was the one that loaded them. Worked fine with hal but now it’s stuffed. So is the sysinfo kio slave. Firefox sound is also hit and miss right now, a problem I haven’t had since openSUSE 11.1! As for systemctl… grrr… I’m this close to slapping my 11.4 drive back in!

Update – Remember how I said that I was close to slapping my 11.4 drive back in? Guess what? As of about half-an-hour ago, I slapped it in. I got so fed up with the various bits of 12.2 that either didn’t work or worked only under protest.

I’ve learned my lesson. Never put a new release on your system until you are happy with it, whatever the distro bods say. That’s what Virtual Box is for.

After installing openSUSE 12.2 on my Acer Aspire One 532h it went with flying colours, everything was revognised, a wonderful release, congratulations to the people that made os 12.2 a reality. KDE worked very light and fast with compositing on. My netbook ran like a new system.

I’m still downloading 12.2 at the moment, but I’ll offer this: No matter what possible little hiccups I might experience with 12.2, I will use OpenSuse no matter what simply because it’s the only “grown up” distro out here, and that’s on top of being the most complete “has-it-all” distro there is. Everything else is nothing more than little kiddie toy distros that you’d load on your grandma’s computer and can’t take seriously. I continue to try all other major distros, and always end up coming back to OpenSUSE – and it’s been this way for me since SUSE Professional 7.3.

Just installed openSUSE 12.2_x86_64 KDE. But for the second time. The first time had serious issues on the runlevel-3 consoles having ridiculously low resolution (640×400 or 800×600) which my monitor supports 1920×1200. Looked like GRUB2 is hideously buggy on openSUSE because I could never change the resolution no matter what. And when I selected `ask’ resolution at boot-time, the OS failed to boot because regarded the `ask’ option as deprecated. Was this released ever tested for bugs??? Sorry – of course I know it was and you can’t catch everything- but have to vent my rage after nearly bricking my newly purchased SSD!

So I did a complete reinstall using GRUB rather than GRUB2 and everything’s perfect! So, thanks!

After to many attempts with both live and DVD version I finally installed openSUSE 12.2-Gnome.
Every time there was just a green screen but no login-screen. I have a ATI radeon HD 6570 card.
Then finally I found the solution (read first!!) on the openSUSE-wiki : install with nomodeset. (fill in on the first screen when you install on the BOOT OPTIONS line.)
Now everything works really fine, Good work, thanks everyone, but I hope the next release booting will for once go automatic with every video card.

my problem is :
at the time of login ,i enter username and password and then after computer given on message ” Oh no!! somthing has going wrong……….etc etc and logut button press.then computer will restart again again.. plz give me any solution

12.2 was the worst Release for me so far: Time resets itself to UTC every reboot/boot, need Admin Password to disable Wifi and (and that one is the worst one) I need to Type in my root Password to Shutdown! There is Literally a little Window that asks me to type in my Password to Shutdown (after the KDE Session ended).
And my Keyboard Layout resets itself too every Boot/Reboot.

I’m with Suse since 7.0. But 12.2 gave mo the will to try something else :)

Generally pretty good but what happened to the shell extensions? They used to be found in the “advanced Setting” but thier gone. They aren’t ready? Then this should not have been released! I hate it when geeks say stuff is ready for release but major and minor stuff isn’t there, doesn’t work or is replaced with something that no one can find!!!

Why change or remove things that work just fine? For professionals it’s always a good idea to not fix something that isn’t broke. It’s the constant changes that will keep linux from being adopted by none geeks.It’s also the reason that they only people that will use it are geeks.

Today’s update (Oct. 7) broke my system. I had to reinstall 12.2 again today. It took more than
1 hour, since I also had to reinstalled TeX Live 2012 from the internet.
Is there anyone having this same experience in updating the system? Nevertheless, I love 12.2 because it is smart.

Agree with what Eric.P is saying: “This release is awful! Iâ€™ve NEVER experience such an unpolished Linux distribution Iâ€™ve used in my nearly-fifteen years using Linux!”

It doesn’t work without crashing on my two absolutely different computers.
At the same time SuSE 12.1 is working without an issue on a system where 12.2 crashes every couple of hours.

And I have some additional problems to add:
1) kernel crashes 2-3 times per day with different symptoms (reported 2 bugs to kernel team already).
2) KDE plasma desktop crashes periodically when a screen goes into power save mode.
3) Cannot get rid-off Network manager being started even I’m using ifup scheme. Why do I need to check that the only error on start is a Network Manager?
4) On dual-harddrive system updating a bootloader with Yast2 leads to non-bootable system. You need manyally reinstall Grub and recreate configuration files to be able to boot again.

As a bottom line. Make sure you’re installing this release on a sandbox first to make sure it is working for you. I know couple of peoples not complaining about this release.

An insistent urging to perform a security version update to Firefox running under OpenSuse 11.2 and KDE4 on an Asus Z96F x86_64 laptop resulted in Firefox (and also Konqueror browser) becoming unstable and repeatedly crashing. This in turn obliged an update of Opensuse itself to 12.2 since 11.2 is itself no longer supported by updates. The online SDB upgrade was followed to the letter, but nonetheless failed partway through, requiring a DVD .ISO image disc instead to be run. That completed without stalling, reporting only as the installation files ripped in that
a) some media definitions apparently relating to kmplayer were ‘unregistered (e.g. all/all, all/allfiles, uri/mms, uri/mnst, uri/mnsu, uri/pnm, uri/rtspu)
b) some problem with fonts/package and interface/x-winamp-skin
c)icedtea (Firefox) plugin – not exist
d) no grub partition (as existing prior to upgrade)

On completion and intended reboot to the updated system, no errors are shown as each module loads but then stalls at the juncture where the login screen should be displayed with the last item shown loaded [OK] being Clam AntiVirus daemon after auditd, CPUfreq, Console Manager, smpppd, kdm, X Display manager, Network Manager, LSB/HAL daemon have all loaded and irq_balancer shuts down.
Rebooting and selecting Safe/command mode stalls at the same juncture.

I note that the user area was quite tight on space (having only some 300Mb free) but this should not be any part of the cause, since the update would have checked on free space needs and prevented the update being initiated if significant.

How can the login screen be recovered/initiated to complete loading the system?

I feel an appreciably improved system performance with respect with that of OpenSuse 12.1.

I had two mishaps:

1. The first restart after installation fails. It works without any more problems after switching off and on the computer. (Grub2)

2. A repetitive system message appears every time I logged in, warning about “removed Sound devices”. I fixed it with the “Sound Configuration” dialog within Yast2, simply disabling that sound devices I don’t need. It looks like I have three devices in my computer. When sound works fine I finally checked “Do not ask again for these devices”. (I have a snapshot).

12.2 is great, well done team! I’m on Opensuse since 8.1 and it is getting better with each release!

I just did (for the first time) an in place upgrade with zypper on my laptop from 12.1 to 12.2 and everything worked fine. The first couple of hours after the upgrade everything was VERY slow, but then after a couple of hours performance was back to normal.